Hex

Jenni Fagan

Polygon, £10

Review By Dani Garavelli

A CELL deep below Edinburgh High Street. December 4, 1591 and/or August 1, 2021. Two women: Geillis Duncan and the mysterious Iris. Geillis is about to be executed as a witch; Iris has travelled through the “null and ether” to bring her comfort in her final hours.

The characters in Jenni Fagan’s Hex are separated by more than four centuries, yet bonded by their treatment at the hands of abusive men. So closely are their experiences of the patriarchy aligned, their voices are interchangeable.

It is Geillis who says: “I’m not a stupid girl. I know to say yes when I am asked to do a thing, only yes and thank you and of course, and I’d be glad to and please allow me!” But it could just as easily be Iris.

Hex is the second book in Polygon’s Darkland Tales: a series of fictional retellings of historical events (the first was Denise Mina’s Rizzio). Geillis Duncan was the first woman accused in the North Berwick Witch Trials.

Still a teenager, she was stripped naked and tortured, her fingers crushed by pilliwinks, a form of thumbscrew. Eventually, she made a feverish confession.

She told of dozens of witches sailing out into the bay in sieves. They conjured a storm to try to sink the ship bringing James VI and his young bride Anne from Denmark.

Fagan’s timing is impeccable. A campaign to secure a pardon for the 2,500 people, mostly women, executed for witchcraft in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries, has fired imaginations and created a cultural moment.

As lawyer Claire Mitchell fights to right this historic miscarriage of justice, artists have been bringing individual stories alive.

Heal & Harrow – a recently-released album by harpist Rachel Newton and fiddler Lauren MacColl – pays tribute to victims such as Lilias Adie, who, having died before she could be tried, was buried in a revenant grave in the intertidal zone on Torryburn Beach in Fife.

Then, just before dawn on International Women’s Day, the lifesize metal figure of another North Berwick “witch” will be burned on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. The event – Soul Murder V: The Exoneration of Agnes Sampson – is the creation of artist Laura Graham.

Fagan’s fascination with witches and the supernatural predates the current trend.

Sorcery, spells and incantations weave their way through her poetry and novels. But in Hex, Fagan charts a direct line from the misogyny of the witch trials to the violence meted out to women today.

“I would like to reassure you that 500 years from now that fine line no longer elongates from uncomfortable to fatal, yet I cannot,” Iris tells her alter ego.

While historians emphasise the ordinariness of the women branded witches, eschewing all allusions to magic, Fagan inhabits a less rigid imaginative space, embracing the mystical and mixing it with a dash of polemic. Iris is a shapeshifter summoned through a seance.

She presents as a crow, with glossy black feathers, and appears to possess eldritch powers. Is she Geiliss’ “familiar”? Neither woman seems sure. But then this confusion makes sense. Like many of those charged with witchcraft, Geillis has been gaslit – a modern term for an age-old concept – until she scarcely knows what she is or what she isn’t.

Fagan recreates this process so well the reader shares her loss of bearings. Working for bailiff David Seaton, Geillis tries to do everything right; to make herself small and biddable. But the harder she tries to please him, the more he insists she is dishonest, lazy and mistrustful.

Seaton starts rumours which spread around town until people begin to “straighten their spines’’ when they see her as if she might “take an inch from their height just by being near them.”

The growing hysteria, and Geillis’ fear and mental disintegration, is echoed in Fagan’s prose which gathers pace as the accusations rack up. “Geillis Duncan has a broomstick. Geillis Duncan hates men. Geillis Duncan spat at my child. Geillis Duncan cursed the pavement so it’s like walking on waves.”

On the mist of her own breath, Geillis sees “two hundred witches in sieves, in cauldrons, in wee paper boats in buckets, in soup pots”.

The reasons for Geillis’ persecution are prosaic. Seaton seeks revenge on his sister-in-law Euphame MacCalzean who has inherited money he believes is rightfully his wife’s.

But he cannot pursue her directly. So he accuses Geillis knowing she will go on to accuse others. (Geillis does accuse Euphame and Euphame is executed before her). Geillis is an easy target. She is attractive – a temptation to men! – a healer and she is known to go out alone at night.

But Fagan’s writing is wild and exciting. As always she is drawn to the wind, to the sea, to the moon which casts its reflected light on Geillis as it does on so many of her characters. She plays with the duality of “witches”, presenting their power alongside their persecution.

Together, Geillis and Iris are a force to be reckoned with. Their potency lies not in black magic or pacts with the devil, but in their femininity; their fertility. Creating new life is presented as a kind of alchemy. “Within our flesh, we make flesh,” Iris says. “Whilst we are reading books, working, fighting, sitting on a bus, we form atria, blood, lungs, legs, nails, hair, eyes, ears.”

The metaphorical storms they conjure are born of their oppression. “It’s what happens when they clip our souls,” Iris says.

Men hate women for their ability to give birth, but most of all they hate their luminescence. Geillis cannot help but shine. “[Men] are always looking for that glint of pure light,” she says. “The absolute absence of light wants its opposite. So it can consume it.”

When Geillis’s light has been consumed, she relies on her “secret moon”, a silver shell she picked up on the shore and smoothed with the rough of her skirt.

Not long before eternal darkness descends, Iris brings her the shell to hold. By then Geillis and Iris are as one, sisters in suffering, heading out into the null.